Final Paper

Aram Bartholl                                                   Eduardo Kac

 

  Aram Bartholl and Eduardo Kac are two contemporary artist that use Digital Media and technology in their works. I chose two pieces of art to compare and contrast. For aram i chose the work "First Person Shooter", for Eduardo i chose the work "Time Capsule".
  Aram Bartholl is an artist that was born in Germany and has been working in berlin for most of his life. He is an artist that works with technology and the internet. He studied architecture at the university of arts in berlin. His artowork tries to show the relationship between digital data and everyday life.He tries to bring technology to physical life. He asks the questions, "In which form does the network data world manifest itself in our everyday life? What returns from cyberspace into physical space? How do digital innovations influence our everyday actions?” He is an artist who does performance pieces as well as interactive works. He also has installations and discussions where he talks about day to day life in the era of Google, Facebook, and Twitter. 

  "First Person Shooter" was a work that Aram Bartholl did in 2006. This work consist of a To Do Kit with an image of a first person shooter game. The game he chose to use was Couner Strike. This was a popular computer game that came out in 1999. The game has a view of a person's arm holding a maching gun. What he did in this work was have people cut out their own glasses which had the image of the gun. This was a view that each person had in real life when wearing these paper glasses.

  The purpose of this arwork was to show the violence that there is in video games. The virtual weapon is brought into physical space. People that participate have a view of what it would be like to have a machine gun everywhere they look to. This project also shows how different our everyday life is from the virtual world. It shows that the virtual world is very seperate from physical and human life.



  Eduardo Kac is an artist that was born in Brazil. He lives in Chicago and that is where he works now. He is an artist that also tries to show relationships between physical life and technology. He is known as a Bio Artist. His art consist of technology and science together to make a performance or an art experiment. Kac merges multiple media and biological processes to create hybrids from the conventional operations of existing communications systems.
  "Time Capsule" is one of his most famous works. This was a performance piece in 1997. The performance is of Eduardo planting a microchip into his left ankle and after that he registers himself into the world wide web. He performs an interactive webscanning of his body. He registers into a database for pets. He did this performance life in a webcast, it was also televised on Television in Brazil.


  He registered himself on to the database above, and this was read in Chicago. The work was to show the difference between technology and physical life. He did this to show how close we are with technology. We are tied to technology. Microchips are not inplanted into humans but they might be in the future, and this is what Kac is trying to express. He explains that, "In "Time Capsule", the presence of the chip (with its recorded retrievable data) inside the body forces us to consider the co-presence of lived memories and artificial memories within us". The memories that humans make can co exist with memory saved on computers.
Both Artists tie technology with everyday life. They both do performances, installations, and discussions where they express how technology impacts our life. Their works bring technology and digital instances to physical life. I found it reall interesting because we use the internet everyday and techonolgy is part of our everyday life. Both works have an impact and show us how technology will only get bigger and soon the internet or anything dealing with technology might be something very physical in our life.

Cited Work
http://www.ekac.org/timcap.html
http://www.datenform.de/fpseng.html
http://datenform.de/blog/
http://www.ekac.org/figs.html

Lecture #2 Joy Garnett

Joy Garnett is a an artist that uses digital images, and photographs to do her paintings. She uses pictures from different places online such as public domain and paints from those images. She is an artist that uses the internet and technology for her artwork. She talked about how she uses blogs, and Google, something that we all use almost every day while on our computer. She talks about her painting that she did called Molotov, where she took images from the mass media, the image was found online. The image belonged to a photographer who owned the rights to that image. A letter was sent to her from her lawyer with threats of a lawsuit for copywright infringement. I find this interesting because this is something that is important in our lifes as artist. How do we know if a photograph is something we have to ask permission to use? I don't believe that an artist is commiting piracy for taking a photograph and putting our input and or view on it. I do believe that credit is something that has to be given to whoever the piece or art belongs to. She speaks about how the painting on her website did give credit to the artist, Susan Meiselas. I believe her paintings are very good. I like what she expresses on her paintings. I think she does a good job of taking a photograph and making the painting look more real and have more feeling to it. I found the lecture very interesting because copyrighted work and people taking it without giving credit is something that is going on right now. We all as artist use the internet and sites such as google images to find inspiration or ideas for our work. I think that the credit should be given to the artist, as Joy Garnett did.

Lecture #1 Cory Arcangel

Cory Arcangel is an artist that uses program codes and digital codes to do his artwork and projects. He is someone i find very interesting. He talks about how he "steals" these codes. Which i thought was very interesting, because of his choice of word that he used. He steals these codes to make his artwork. He is a digital programmer that started as a musician. His work Data Diaries was very interesting. He said that he started data diaries by "messing around" with files and programs on the computer. I think that this is awsome because that is the way that people seem to learn about computers and programs, by messing around. He also uses software to do his art he talks about a "ghetto software" he uses called Lighting Paint. The geto boys vs. beach boys video was another project he did where he put two different videos of both music groups and played them side by side. He made a mash up and this is similar to our youtube project for class. He taks about internet surfing which is something that most all of us do everyday. I find it enjoyable that his artwork has to do with many contemporary things as well as old school software like old video games. It was very interesting and I like that he is an artist that stays on top of pop culture he is someone that us, as new students that use internet and different computer programs can relate to.

Exhibiton/ Extreme Animals

The Extreme Animals are two artist that do performances as well as video art. When going to the exhibition I had no idea what to expect. I thought it was very interesting as well as entertaining. Their performance was a different experience. I liked how they mixed music with different types of art. They used animations that seemed really trippy. I thought that the home video look to their works was really good. The exhibition was of both artists showing the audience videos of their work. They played live instruments as well as music on the computer. The images shown on the videos were interesting. I enjoyed the video where it had many clips of shows and commercials from the 90s and 80s. It really made me think back when i use to watch that tv show, or rembering I had seen that commercial before. The videos were kind of long which made it hard to watch at times. Above i have a link to one of their videos. Its is very good artwork and the music i believe goes very well with it. I thought it was a real entertaining experience. I enjoyed some of the videos and both artist were funny and good performers. I did think one of the videos was kind of boring i did not leave until it was over but watching an arm waving tube man for 5 minutes straight was difficult. Overall i thought this was a great performance and exhibition. I will keep up to date with new videos they make because I did like it.
If I had two questions to ask the artists it would be:
1. What inspires you to make these videos?
2. How long does it take to make each video?

Final Project

For my final project i decided to participate in the Johny Cash Project, as well as Man with a Movie Camera.

#1 Man With A Movie Camera: The Global Remake
http://dziga.perrybard.net/contributions/show/2646

For the project man with a movie camera, i decided to the the scene where the eye keeps on blinking. I tried to make my image of my eye rolling instead of blinking. I chose the eye because it gives some sort of symbolism in the video and the blinking adds a good effect. I thought rolling my eye would be me putting my own spin on the scene.

#2 The Johnny Cash Project

For the Johny Cash project i drew the image of Johny cash and the sunset in the background. This was a very fun thing to do even though the software for painting on the website was very limited. I decided to go with a background of blurry dots everywhere and a white sky. I reall like the way it came out, and i hope to see it on the website when i watch the video.

Youtube Mixer

For the youtube mixer project i decided to look for videos of my favorite basketball player. Kobe Bryant. I wanted videos that had highlights of his best plays as well as videos of him doing dunks on people. I found good videos which incorporated music, as well as two videos that were of him talking about the game of basketball and video of an anouncer going through all of kobe's best plays. This was a very fun project and i liked the end result.

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